Tag Archives: writing

Today, I am beginning my final attempt at writing this story that I have tried to write off and on for nearly 7 years now. It is, I think, a novel, but I won’t know for sure until it is finished. If I can’t do it right this time, I’m giving it up as too difficult for me. That said, I’m not giving up without a fight. I have a plan this time, which I didn’t have in my previous attempts. I also have a secret weapon that I hope will make this last attempt a success.

The plan: I’m giving myself a season to write the first draft and a second season to write the second draft. Start today, I plan to be finished with the first draft by August 31. At that point, I plan to take the month of September off from writing and not even look at what I wrote during that time. Then, beginning on October 1, I’ll start the second draft with an aim to finish it by December 31.

The secret weapon: this time, I have an outline.

That may come as a surprise to longtime readers. In the spectrum of plotters versus pantsers, I’ve been a proclaimed pantsers for a long time. Indeed, all of the short fiction I’ve sold was produced without outlines of any kind. And therein lies the rub: I have, to this point, written only one draft of a novel, way back in 2013. I never moved beyond that first draft because it seemed relatively incoherent. I’ve made numerous attempts at the story I intend to start today, and all have failed. In considering why this may be so, I decided to swallow my pride, and assume that at least part of the problem was that for something so big, I need an outline to provide waypoints for where I am going. My pal, Bud Sparhwak, will be pleased.

Armed with an outline, I plan to get started today and see how things go. I’m feeling pretty good right now, but that just may be the excitement of getting started. We’ll see how I’m feeling in mid-July, when I am deep in the middle of this thing–and on August 31, I’ll know once and for all if I am capable of writing this thing.

I don’t plan on doing any updates along the way. There just isn’t the time, and given my schedule, any time I can spend writing, I want to spend working on the story. But I will post an update by August 31, letting you know one way or another, if I succeeded in completing the story.

Never having used an outline before, I don’t know what a novel outline is supposed to look like. Mine consists of many sheets of yellow legal paper with a rough outline of all the chapters, and more pages that break each chapter down into things that I think need to happen. There’s also random notes scribbled here and there and various arrows point this way and that. I could have typed it up, I supposed, and brought some more order to it, but I like the chaotic feel of it. It feels like I am less locked in to a specific line of events, and have a kind of fuzzy map of how things are supposed to happen. If the outline works, and the story is a success, maybe I’ll post those pages someday as an example of an outline that worked–for me at least. (I suppose, it would be equally useful to post the outline if the story doesn’t work out, as an example of something that doesn’t work, but I don’t know if I’d have the nerve to do that.)

I’m trying not to think in terms of metrics on this go around. You can do the math and figure that for a 90,000 word novel, I need to write about a thousand words per day, on average. If my past experience is any guide, I’ll be well ahead of the curve in the first week or two, then I’ll hit the curve for a while, before falling off. I’m hoping that outline will serve to protect me somewhat from that falling off, but only time will tell.

So what’s the story about? I’m not really sure myself. I usually can’t answer that question until after I’ve written the first draft. But from what I know right now, it’s about baseball, and growing old, and the strange effects of… well, if I ever sell the thing I don’t want to spoil it so for now, you’ll just have to use your imagination.

Like this:

I read in theNew York Times that Roger Kahn died. The author of The Boys of Summer (the #2 book on Sport Illustrated’s 100 Greatest Sports Books, right after A. J. Lieblings The Sweet Science) was 92 years old. Earlier in the week I read obituaries for Gene Reynolds (M*A*S*H), and Kirk Douglas, who at 103 appears to be out-survived only by Olivia de Havilland. All of these obituaries made me want to write about obituaries.

This, however,
exposed an increasingly frequent problem I encounter when writing on this blog:
I’ve written about obituaries already. In fact, I’ve written about them more
than once. In 2016 I wrote about them in “How I
Read the Newspaper.” I touched on the subject again in 2017 in a post aptly
titled, “Obituaries.”
I returned to the subject last year in “Morning Routines.”

I’ve written about
6,500 posts for this blog—about 2.5 million words, spanning more than 15 years.
Since I tend to write about whatever comes to mind instead of focusing on one
particular subject, it sometimes seems as though there isn’t anything I haven’t
written about. When something occurs to me that seems like it might be worthy
subject, the first thing I do these days is a search of the blog to see if I’ve
written about it before. I am frequently surprised that I have.

Having written
about a subject before doesn’t automatically prevent me from writing about it
again. Two conditions typically push me to write again on a subject: (1) I have
something new to add; or (2) it has been a long time (a few years at least) since
I last wrote about it. Readers come and go, change and evolve, so why not write
about it again?

The first
condition is most common. Having something new to say is useful. What’s new is
often a change of opinion on a subject over time. The classic example of this
is my opinion of audiobooks. In January 2012, I wrote a piece on
audiobooks where I stated, quite forcefully, that audiobooks were not for
me. Reading that piece now is painful now, especially my snobbish reasoning for
why I though audiobooks weren’t for me. Eight years, and over 400 audiobooks later,
my
opinionhas
changed.

As a kind of
experiment, I tried to think of subjects that I might not have written about
(or that I had completely forgotten I’d written about) over the years, and then
search to blog to see if I had or hadn’t. Here is just some of the results:

Notably absent
here is political writing. This sometimes surprises me, given that my degree is
in political science and journalism. The truth is that it seems everywhere I
turn, people are writing about politics, and anything I have to say has been
said before. I don’t particularly enjoy writing about politics, either. I’d
just as soon write about something more obscure, but fun: like my inability
to locate a paperclip when I need one.

Perhaps all of
this is just to say that, while I try my best not to be too repetitive here,
some repetition is an inevitable byproduct of the thousands of posts I’ve
already written. I ask for your patience with this as I blunder on into the
future.

Like this:

I sometimes wonder if professional baseball players envy their teammates. Does a career average player look to a superstar and wonder: Why can’t I be that good? What’s holding me back? Envy isn’t an emotion that I am proud of, but sometimes that painful awareness of a talent I don’t possess and someone else does creeps in.

The truth is, I envy all sorts of writers, not for their
success as much as their pure natural ability and talent. Stephen King is among
my favorite writers, and I envy his ability to tell a good story, which for me
is the single most important part of writing fiction. I envy Ray Bradbury’s
lyricism. When I have tried to write like Bradbury, it always feels forced and
phony.

I envy the nonfiction writer’s ability to research their
material. E.B. White is among my favorite essayists and I envy the easy of his
voice. Another of my favorites is John McPhee. I envy his abilities as well,
but I envy something about him even more: I envy his travels, his ability to
embed himself with whatever subject he was writing about and make it a part of
his life. John McPhee has the rarest of talents: he can take any subject
and make it interesting.

I know I shouldn’t be envious. I should be thankful for
what abilities I possess as a writer. Those abilities, such as they are, were
nurtured by parents who encouraged reading. They are almost entirely developed
of brute force, and stubbornness. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I submitted and
submitted and submitted, until finally, editors started to buy my stories. No
shortcuts for me!

As a writer, I am rarely satisfied with what I write. At
best, my writing seems “good enough” to send out, and on occasion, it is
published, but I often look at what I write, and mentally compare it to those
writers that I look up to as role models, and it seems always that we are in
different leagues. They are major league superstars, bound for the Hall of
Fame. I, on the other hand, bounce around the minor leagues, never quite
getting to the level of the majors.

I desperately want to make that leap. I can imagine it, and perhaps that is half the
battle. When I was much younger, and just starting to write, I used to daydream
that one day, in my wildest imagination, I might actually sell a story to Analog. It seemed impossible, like
winning the lottery. Eventually, I did sell to Analog. I could imagine it, and as impossible as it seemed, I made
that leap.

The next leap seems much more difficult to make, and it
has stymied my writing since late 2015 when I sold my last piece of fiction.
I’ve been unsure of my writing ever since. I find myself writing the same
pieces of story over and over again, to claim to myself that I am writing, when
all I am really doing is going in circles. Part of my problem is that I am not
sure where to go from here. Part of my problem is envy and fear. I want to tell
stories like Stephen King. I want to write like E.B. White. I want to embed
myself in my research like John McPhee.

I suppose there is a danger in comparing yourself to
someone at the top of their profession, especially when I am close to the
bottom. I try to look at it optimistically: I have a lot of room to grow. But
it is a hard hill to climb when you don’t have much time in the day to practice
your craft.

This year I have set a modest goal for myself: to get back
to writing every day. Even if it is only for five or ten minutes, try to write
something every day. I considered a tougher goal of writing a story a month–12
stories in the year, far more than I have ever written before. But that seemed
self-defeating. The first step is to get back into the habit, to start flexing
those muscles again.

I have a smaller, more subtle goal as well: to try to be
less envious of other writers and instead, to appreciate their talents for the
beauty they create instead.

Like this:

I have often daydreamed about buying a typewriter and using it to write all of my first drafts. With a typewriter, I’d have no distractions from email, or social media. I wouldn’t be tempted by the apps on my computer. I’d slide in the paper and start typing. Of course, things like typos and corrections would be more problematic than on a word processor. Then, too, I wouldn’t have an electronic archive of those first drafts, just the paper copies. I suppose I could scan those. Finding the right typewriter is tricky, and maintaining it is trickier.

Enter my new Freewrite by Astrohaus. The Freewrite is billed as a “Smart typewriter for distraction-free writing.” So far, I’ve put a couple thousand words through it, and I think that is enough for some initial thoughts. First, the device itself.

The Freewrite is about the size of my circa 1950 Royal QuietComfort DeLuxe manual typewriter, although without as high a profile. It is significantly lighter than my Royal typewriter, and rests easily on my desk. It has a built-in handle for carrying around, and a full-sized keyboard that feels comfortable to use. Its e-ink screen is divided into to parts: a large upper screen where the text I write appears, and through which I can scroll back and forth to review; and a smaller status window that can show me various pieces of information about what I am working on.

Freewrite

Royal and Freewrite

The Freewrite seems to address many of my concerns about using
a typewriter: It saves everything I write locally, but can also connect to WiFi
for the purpose of syncing documents to a cloud service like Dropbox, Evernote,
or Google. The synced documents appear in Word format, and I can use Markdown
when typing on my Freewrite to create the basic formatting I want in my
document.

What I like about the Freewrite is that it is designed for
drafting. There are no distractions. I don’t get email notifications; I can’t
check Twitter or Facebook. It is simply a tool that allows me to focus on the
first draft of whatever it is I happen to be writing, much as a typewriter
would do.

Indeed, the Freewrite has no arrow keys. I can’t go back and
edit something I’ve written, only add to it, and that is by design. The idea is
to focus on writing and worry about editing and revising later. Not having the
arrow keys takes some getting used to, but I kind of like it. It is leading me
into a whole new process for writing, one which I haven’t completely settled on
yet, but the basis version is:

Write first drafts in Freewrite.

Print and mark-up the first drafts from the Word
documents created by the Freewrite.

Revise and edit in Word for final copy.

There is a switch on the Freewrite to allow me to
switch between one of three folders that my documents get synced to. Right now,
I have them set up as follows:

One folder for fiction.

One folder for blog posts (like this one).

One folder for correspondence.

I really like the simplicity of the device. I like its
portability, too, although I haven’t taken it out with me yet. Part of this is
that the opportunity has not yet arisen. Part of this is because the tool is
designed to promote distraction-free writing, and I fear that upon seeing the
device, people will be curious about it and ask me lots of questions–and I will
get very little writing done.

As a use it more, I’ll have more to say about the device and how it is affecting my writing process. For now, consider this post the first official thing I’ve drafted completely on my new Freewrite.

Like this:

With Christmas just a few weeks away, I’ve been daydreaming. When I daydream–something that occurs with increasing frequency these days–I often find myself having imaginary conversations with people. Sometimes these are people I know, and other times they are constructs, like characters in a story, that allow the conversation to progress the way I want it to. Recently, in on one of these daydreams, someone asked me, “What do you want for Christmas?” Without hesitating I replied, “All I want for Christmas is to be a syndicated columnist.” Perhaps the most telling piece is that, while the conversation was imagined, I spoke those words aloud.

When I grow up, I want to be a syndicated columnist. I love to write, and I need to make a living, and it seems there should be some way to combine those. Of course, I’d need something to write about, and then there’s the matter of people to read what I write. These are details, of course, but perhaps we should consider them.

What would I write about? Given that I have been heavily influenced by the writers like E. B. White and Andy Rooney, it seems like some kind of hybrid would be in order. I am not as much the farmer as E. B. was, and I am not as cynical (usually, anyway) as Andy Rooney was. So perhaps something in between. White wrote a monthly column for Harper’s from 1938-1943 or thereabout. I could write a monthly column. Andy Rooney had a column that appeared in hundreds of newspapers 3 times a week, I think. And of course he had his 3 minutes at the end of 60 Minutes. (Whenever Rooney was on vacation I called the show 57 Minutes). I think my syndicated column should be somewhere between three times a week, and once a month.

Both Andys (White went by the name “Andy” to some of his friends) wrote about ordinary, everyday events, but in their own distinct ways. Indeed, Andy the Second was heavily influenced by Andy the First, and if you don’t believe me, spend time reading some of their stuff. I can probably write about ordinary, everyday events. Occasionally, each of the Andys would write something more controversial. I could probably manage that from time-to-time as well. Indeed, it would be a great way to generate letters, and I’d finally have more than one correspondent to whom I could write real letters.

I imagine there are qualifications one needs to meet to become a syndicated columnist. First and foremost, one must be able to write, and preferably (though not a showstopper based on some columns I have read) write well. I don’t have many talents, but I’ve never had a problem putting words down on paper.

It would probably help if the writing is entertaining in some way. If readers respond to the writing in a positive way that is always a good thing. It also helps sell advertising. I like to think that my writing is entertaining, but who am I to judge.

I suppose it is a plus if a columnist is a journalist, or has some background in journalism. My degree was in political science and journalism, although really my degree was in learning how to learn. An editor would probably want some kind of c.v. for a prospective columnist. You know, have you ever done anything like this before? My c.v., humble as it is would read something like:

Wrote a monthly review column for a science fiction magazine.

Wrote a technology column for The Daily Beast.

Have written a blog since 2005 with 6,468 posts (including this one). Some people even like what I write and occasionally tell me so.

It occurs to me that the kind of column I would like to write is more or less the some kind of thing I write here. How would I pitch that to an editor? In my daydreams (there I go again) I picture that scene in Seinfeld, when Jerry and George pitch their pilot to NBC and when asked what the show is about, George tells them it’s a show about nothing. Well, my column wouldn’t be about nothing, but it wouldn’t necessarily be the stuff that sells newspapers.

I think this blog may be the closest I come to writing a syndicated column, and I guess I should be thankful for what I have. The editor and I see eye-to-eye. No one has ever pushed a deadline on me, or told me I couldn’t say that because it would scare off half the readers (or worse, the advertisers). I have no advertisers to answer to. Really, when I think about it, the only difference between this blog and a syndicated column is maybe a few million readers, and a paycheck.

It’s disappointing, really. It means that the next time I go out walking and start to daydream, and some faceless construct asks me, “What do you want for Christmas?” I’ll have to come up with something else. Maybe a salt farm in Maine?

Like this:

Yesterday, I attended the first day of Capclave, the Washington, D.C. area local science fiction convention. This has been my local convention ever since I started to sell stories. I haven’t been writing much the last few years and so I haven’t been attending conventions, but I decided to attend this convention for two reasons: First, Robert J. Sawyer and Martha Wells are the guests of honor, and second, I’ve started to write again, and it would be great to catch up with old friends.

Rob Sawyer was the GoH at the first science fiction convention I ever attended, RavenCon in 2007. I had just sold my first story, and Rob was incredibly nice to me. I think the last time I saw him was at the Chicago Worldcon, and it was great to get to see him again yesterday.

Chatting with Bill Lawhorn, one of the Capclave con-runners, we tried to figure out when I first attended Capclave. I thought it was in 2010, the year that Connie Willis was guest of honor. Bill read through the list of earlier Capclave’s and I was fairly certain I hadn’t attended those.

I was wrong.

Searching the blog this morning, I found that I attended Capclave 2007 when Jeffrey Ford and Ellen Datlow were guests of honor. I was not a panelist then–indeed, the first time I was ever on a panel was at Readercon in 2008, I think. But I sat in awe on many of the panels as people whose names I’d been seeing on books and in the magazines talked.

At that 2007 Capclave I attended a workshop led by Edmund Schubert, Jagi Lamplighter, Jeri Smith-Ready, and Allen Wold. In the years since, I’ve sold more stories to Ed Schubert than any other editor; I attended the Lauchpad Astronomy workshop for writers in Laramie, Wyoming with Jeri Smith-Ready (her husband, Christian Ready helped run it), and yesterday, I moderated a panel that included Allen Wold among the panelist.

I had a late lunch with my pal, Bud Sparhawk, who has to be one of the most prolific “retired” people I know. It had been a few years since I’d seen Bud and it was great to catch up with him.

I had my first panel at 8 pm, “Before the Beginning,” a panel on what happens before a writer starts to write a story. It turned out I was moderating this panel, which included Sunny Moraine, Ian Randal Strock, Ted Weber, and Allen Wold. It was a light audience of maybe a dozen people, but I think we had a pretty good discussion. It was the first panel I’ve moderated in several years and I was a little nervous about it, so I made sure to prepare ahead of time. For those curious, here are my notes (the stuff handwritten, are things I scribbled down during the panel):

I’ve got two panels lined up today, neither of which I have to moderate, fortunately. Looking forward to another fun day.

Like this:

It has been a few days since my last post. I’d been traveling for work, and spent much of the weekend working as well so writing the last few days has been minimal. Yesterday was Day 8, and through Day 8, I am 811 words ahead of pace. That sounds good, but things are a bit deceiving, and this is where setting a daily writing goal can be problematic.

Although I’ve written 4,800 words, only the most recent 1,700 are part of the novel now. The other 3,100 words have been tossed because they weren’t right. (They weren’t deleted, as I don’t delete, but they have been crossed out in the manuscript. So despite having averaged 600 words per day over the first 8 days of writing, I have only 1,700 words of acceptably story to show for it.

You see the flaw in a plan like this, right?

Fortunately, for me, this is fairly common at the beginning of a story. I stumble around a lot trying to find the right point of view from which to tell the story, and trying to find the right voices for that point of view. I started in first person, thinking that was how I wanted to tell it, but quickly realized that wouldn’t work, at least, not for the entire story. There are things the reader needs to know that the viewpoint character doesn’t know, and that is hard to do in first person without some kind of special talent, like telepathy, which this particular character does not have.

So I switched to third person, and rewrote. But I struggle more with voice in third person than I do in first. Moreover, I decided that I was going to move between characters, although never within a scene. So I needed to come up with distinct voices for each of the character viewpoints thus far.

Finally, I couldn’t figure out where best to start the story. I think I mentioned that it takes place in two distinct time periods separated by about 60 years. I tried starting at the beginning (in the earlier time period), but couldn’t seem to get to the heart of the matter quickly enough. The sense of overall urgency in the story was lacking. So I tried again, this time from the latter time period. That seemed to work better. Yesterday (my best day so far) I wrote 1,700 words covering the first two scenes, and I think I have things finally going the way I want them.

As one who does not outline (pantser instead of plotter), I also finally have a sense of the general direction the story is going. Right now it looks like there will be three overarching “parts” to the novel. The first and last will take place in the latter time period, with the middle part (a fairly big part, I think) taking place in the past.

I haven’t written yet today, but I know what comes next, and I am eager to write it, and that is always a good sign.

This difference between how much writing I do toward the first draft, and how much stays in the first draft is tricky, however. If I am aiming for a 90,000 word first draft, it is completely conceivable that I’d write 100,000 words or more, only 90,000 of which end up in the draft. To that end, I’ve added another element to my logbook for my novel. This is a green bar. Each day, that bar will indicate a cumulative count of how much of what I written is in the first draft. Stuff that I’ve cut won’t show up in this measurement. As of today, therefore, things look like this:

Introducing the green “draft total” bar.

I expect to get in some decent writing this week, and over the weekend. Next week I am traveling again, so we’ll see how things go.

Like this:

More than 24 hours passed between my second and third writing session, but still three days in a row. I wrote yesterday early in the morning, before 5 am. Today, I just finished my day’s writing at almost 7 pm. I managed 620 words, so that’s three days above my 500 words/day quota. Today’s writing felt a little choppy–I felt like I was throwing a little too much out there at once. But I resisted the temptation to go back and change anything,. Right now I just need to keep moving forward.

On the plane out to L.A. I finished re-reading On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. I think I’ve read this book 7 times now. It is the only book on writing I have ever read and found value in. I re-read it now and then for inspiration, especially when starting something new.

Having finished it on the plane, I needed something else to read, so I started reading Mary Robinette Kowal‘s The Calculating Stars. I stopped reading science fiction several years back, not for any particular reason. I just wanted to read other things, mostly nonfiction, but other types of fiction as well. But I will be attending Capclave next month, and it seemed like I should have read something recent in the genre, especially since I will be on panels there.

The book, so far, is amazing. I’m always impressed when writers do a good job at something technical. One of the main characters in Mary’s book is a pilot, and as a former pilot myself, I was impressed with Mary’s descriptions of flying. But the story is very good, too, and therein lies a problem for me.

When I am writing a story, I really can’t read fiction. I usually avoid it. But Mary’s book is so good that I just have to keep reading. And I suspect, by the time I finish it (maybe tomorrow on the plane home) that I’ll want to jump right into The Fated Sky, sequel to The Calculating Stars.

All of this is to say that Mary’s book is very, very good. So good, that I am breaking my own rule of avoiding reading fiction while I am writing fiction. The rule exists not so much because I am afraid what I am writing will be influenced by what I am reading. Instead, I worry that, given my limited time, I will choose to read her novel instead of work on my own. It’s fine to skip a day here or there, but if I start to skip too much, I start to lose the continuing of what I am writing.

In any case, three days into my own novel, I’ve got about 2,500 words written, and I think I might be closing in on the end of the first chapter. I don’t know how other writers think in terms of chapters. I generally write and number scenes, but as I go, I get sense that several scenes fit together in a collection that is properly called a chapter, and that is how I label them. I think chapter one will be done tomorrow or maybe Friday.

Like this:

I was so tired yesterday, after not sleeping much the night before and being up early for my flight to L.A., that as soon as I finished writing, I crawled into my hotel bed at about 6:45 pm and collapsed. That meant that I was up early, despite getting 9 hours of sleep. So before heading into the office, I took advantage of the time to get in some writing.

I added the second scene to the novel, just shy of 1,000 words. I jumped viewpoints in this scene, and am set to do so again in the next scene, before jumping back to the original view point in scene 4. As many of my stories are first person, third person is harder for me. As I write, I worry that the different view points are not distinct enough from one another. In other words, instead of having to find the right voice for the story–which is always the hard part for me at the beginning–I have to find the right voices. And those voices need to be distinct enough from one another so that they come across as different people.

My other worry is that the story is interesting enough to keep a reader’s attention. This is a slippery slope for me. In the past, I worry about this too much and end up going back and starting things over to find what I think is a more interesting approach. I do this again and again and write a lot but make little real progress. I am trying to learn from that here, and I keep reminding myself that this is the first draft, and until it is finished, no one but me is going to see it. Let me just get the story down and I can decide if it is interesting enough to hold a reader (and make it more interesting, if needed) in the second draft.

It did feel good to get in my quota (and then some) before my day even gets started. I’m eager to write the next couple of scenes, and that is always a good sign. There’s a chance I’ll get some more writing in this evening, but for now, after two days, the score is about 1,800 words written compared to 1,000 words of baseline. So I’m nearly 2 days ahead of schedule at this point. That’s a good way to start.

Like this:

The Little Man is learning about the scientific method in
school: making observations, asking a question, forming a hypothesis, making
predictions, testing prediction, wash, rinse, repeat. Writing this novel, while
not a perfect fit for the scientific method, certainly borrows from it.
Observations I have made in the past when attempting to write at length have
led to several questions. These include: Can I write well at length? Can I
create a story that holds a reader through 100,000 words, and make them want more
when it is all over?

I am generally a
pantser—one who writes by the seat of his pants, without planning much beyong
where I am in the story. Stephen King has likened this method of writing to digging
up a fossil, revealing a bit at a time, until eventually, the whole thing is
there for you to look at. I have also heard this described as a “headlight”
method of writing: writing in the dark, with a headlight which allows you only
to see a few steps ahead at any time.

This method has worked
well for me with short fiction. In fact, I have sold every piece of short
fiction I wrote using this method and sold exactly none of the pieces I plotted
out in advance. That is well and good for short fiction, but I am becoming more
skeptical that it works for me with longer fiction. My hypothesis, therefore,
would be: If I blended my methods, mixing plotting and pantsing, I could write
and finish a novel length story that keeps both me and readers interested
throughout.

It is important to
me to keep the story fresh for me. If it dulls on me while I write it, it
certainly will dull on readers and that makes me losing interest in telling the
story. Returning to the headlight analogy, perhaps if I set out waypoints, close
enough that I know what direction they are in, but far enough away that I still
need my headlight to find my way there, I’ll write a better story. This
prediction is certainly testable, both in terms of the process and the output.
Subsequent drafts allow me to iterate through this prediction and testing
phase.

But what is the story? If you follow along with this lab book, it would be difficult to have the right context without knowing something about the story I am trying to write. And yet, I can’t talk about (or write about) the story specifics without losing the desire to write the story. In this regard, I am reminded of Ken Lui’s excellent novella, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” In that story, it was possible to witness past events, but doing so consumed the ability to witness it again. Once I tell a story, whether describing it to a friend, or typing it into the keyboard, I seem to lose my desire and ability to tell that same story again.

What I can tell you
is this:

Like the last several stories I sold, this novel features baseball as an important thread.

The story takes place across two distinct time periods separated by about 60 years.

Like “Gemma Barrows Comes to Cooperstown” (IGMS, May 2015), the story, while centered around professional baseball, is really not about baseball as much as the effect the game had over the course of one person’s life… and its potential effect on civilization as a whole.

There is an element of the fantastic to the story, but I won’t say any more than that right now.

This is how I think
of the story, now, at least. I’ll try to come back to this when the first draft
is finished and see how that matches up to what I said here. Often, the story
finds its own path as I write.

I learned through a
lot of trial an error that I need a good beginning and a good ending to get
started. These provide anchoring points, and while they may change over the
course of a story, I need them to get started to know where I am going. In this
case, I have 9 “waypoints” that I’ve marked out along the way to help me across
what I imagine will be at least 90,000 words of storytelling. I am hopeful that
these waypoints will keep me on track. Unlike short stories, where I have a pretty
good sense of ending when I start out, for this one, I have only a vague sense
of the ending. This could be good or bad. I’m going to take it as good. 90,000
words is long way from beginning to end and a lot can happen. Better to keep some
slack in the line.

It would be good to
have a schedule. That’s tough. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to write every
day, given work and family obligations. I have no problem writing for 10 minutes
here or there, but 10 minutes one day, no writing the next, and 2 hours the day
after that makes it tough to come up with a schedule. So, I’m taking a page
from my project management experience, and looking at past history. In 2013,
when I wrote my first novel draft, I started at the end of the February and
finished mid-September of that year. Call it six months, or 180 days. 95,000
words divided by 180 days comes to an average of 527 words/day. Let’s round it
down to 500 words/day on average.

If I start in the
next couple of days, I should finish in 180 days. Monday, September 23 is the
first day of fall. Seems like as good a date as any to target as a start date. At
500 words/day that would give me an end date of March 21, 2020.

In project
management, there is usually some contingency built in. Let’s call it 10%, or 9,000
words. 9,000/500 = 18 days of contingency. There may be some days I am not able
to write at all. There are also vacations, busy work scheduled, etc. Of course,
on other days I may write more than 500 words, but let’s factor in the
contingency to plan for the unexpected. Adding 18 days to March 21, 2020 we get
April 8, 2020.

I will aim to have
the first draft of this novel finished on Wednesday, April 8, 2020.

Again, this is a
baseline that we can come back to in April and see how things are going. If I
am off, we can investigate why.

We now have the baselines
for this experiment of mine:

Target length: 90,000 words

Target start date: Monday, September 23, 2019

Daily goal: 500 words

Contingency: 10% (9,000 words, or 18 days)

Target completion date: Wednesday, April 8,
2020

And yes, all of these stats are tracked and captured in a Google Spreadsheet (called my “Logbook for a Novel”) which I will talk about tomorrow when I talk about my tools for this project.

Of course, the first draft of a novel is only one part. What about after? Well, I’m not ready to plan that far ahead. One step at time, as the saying goes. I’ll worry about the second draft after I have a completed first draft.

Like this:

I recently mentionedon Twitter
that I have started writing again. I stopped writing for several reasons, but
the most important one was that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write anymore. Moreover,
with all of the good writing out there today, I wasn’t sure if what I wrote
would make much of an impact. But my desire to write was stronger than my
concern over impact, so here I am, writing again.

But what to write? For years now, I’ve had the idea for what
I think is a novel-length story. The story has challenged me. I’ve started it
many times, and it has always stymied me. I can’t quite figure out the right
way to tell it. I can’t quite figure out the right voice for the narrator. But
I think it is a good story, an entertaining one, one worth trying to tell.

I have only ever written one novel. In 2013, I wrote the first
draft of a science fiction novel. It was the one and only novel have ever written.
It never made it out of first draft. It was a kind of spring training. I needed
to know if I could carry a story through 90,000 words, and I managed to that,
although I’m not sure how interesting or entertaining the story really is. If nothing
else, however, the experience taught me that I could write at length.

Earlier in my day job career as a programmer, I occasionally
encountered tough coding problems. I’d pick around the edges of these problems
for days or weeks, until finally, one day, I’d come into the office and say to
myself, “I’m not budging from this chair until I’ve got this problem under
control.” Something about the mental state that put me in almost always worked.
With a high degree of focus, I was able to accomplish more than I thought I
could.

That is what this lab book for a novel is all about.

I have decided to write this novel. I have decided to give
it the kind of focus that has helped me solve problems in the past. And I have
decided to write about the experience of writing a novel not just to add focus,
but with the idea that it might be useful to other people who are trying to do
the same thing. I call these posts my “Lab Book” for a novel because I think of
them the way I think of my old lab books from science classes and labs. I had a
science teacher who taught me that a good lab book records everything, successes
as well as failures. By going through a lab book, another scientist should be
able to reproduce the results. That may not work perfectly for writers, because
writing is not an exact science, but maybe it will prove helpful.

This is not a “how-to” guide for writing a novel. I’d
be wary of any such thing. Instead, this lab book is a description of how one
writer—me—went about writing one particular novel, with all of the frustrations
and successes therein. I think it is just as important to record mistakes and
frustrations as it is progress.

Last night, at my writers’ group, I was talking with some
other writers about how hard it is for me to explain the problems I run into when
writing a story. First, it is very hard to complain to non-writers. I suspect
to many non-writers, writing looks easy and it is anything but, at least for
me. Second, it is almost as hard for me to talk with writers about the problems
I have writing because I don’t like discussing what I am writing while I am writing
it. For one thing, we all know writers who are eager to tell anyone within earshot
all about the plot of the novel they are working on. I can’t do that because I
don’t know the plot—only know a little more than what I have written. For
another, rehashing my story dulls it in my mind, and makes me less excited to
write about it.

It occurred to me last night, however, that one solution may be a lab book like this. I can write about problems I’m having with a story without writing about the story. Or I can just plain vent, and other writers will know that these things happen to all of us. I can write about good days and bad, and provide context to why they were good and bad. I can write about what happens after I finish, assuming, of course, I do finish.

Don’t expect a lab book post every day. That would be asking
too much of myself. However, I will write them as frequently as I am able and
try to identify situations in which I think the posts will be most illustrative
of my process. I will include a “Day #” in each post title, so that
those following along know how long I’ve been working on the novel. I’m sure it
will evolve as I go along.

Expect a handful of baseline posts over the next few days. Any real lab book should set a baseline so that people referring to it know the conditions at the start of the experiment. To that end, I plan to post on the following baseline topics over the next few days:

My writing credentials and experience up to this
point.

A very general description of the story I want
to write, including some targets like length. This is won’t be a description of
the plot, but a sentence or two that gives some context for the story.

The tools I plan to use to write the story.

A few words on my writing process so far. I may
experiment from what I am used to as part of this process in order to make it a
success, but I think it is important to know how I have worked in the
past in order to see if any of the deviations I make this time around prove
helpful or harmful.

With those prefatory posts out of the way, I’ll start writing, and the day I start I’ll mark as Day 1. We’ll go from there.

Comments and questions are encouraged along the way. I learn
best through practical exercises. I learned how to tell short stories by writing
a lot of them. I imagine the same is true for telling longer stories. Readers’ questions
and comments not only help me, but may help others who stumble along this lab
book.

All of these posts will be categorized under Lab Book for a
Novel, so if you want to follow along with just these posts, and not have them
cluttered by other things I write here, the category is available for that.

Like this:

Writers of old had it easy. Take sportswriters, for instance. When it came to actually sitting down and writing, their biggest decision was which brand of typewriter to use. Some of those manual typewriters could be tiring, but the stories were rarely that long. They filed their stories by wire, and then went out for steaks with the players, or each other.

Writers today have a lot more overhead. At least, this writer does. Few of us write on typewriters anymore. The Royal QuietComfort that sits here in my office has a broken A key, which would make writing difficult. Instead, I have to make a series of interrelated decisions that impact my ability to produce copy:

What platform should I write on (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS)?

What tool should I use for my writing (Word, Scrivener, Notepad, Vim, Google Docs, etc., etc.)?

Where do I store my files (locally on the hard disk, in the cloud, and if so, which ecosystem to I align myself with: iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive)?

How do I manage revisions to my writing?

For those turn-of-the-Twentieth-century sportswriters, these decisions were relatively easy: A Royal typewriter, paper and ribbon, a filing cabinet, and some carbon paper could handle all of this. Why have things become so much more complex?

This question has fascinated me for a while now, perhaps because I can never seem to settle on the right combination of options. I suspect this is because there is no “right” combination, and that makes things more difficult. I thought that technology made things easier, but the longer I’ve been writing, and dealing with technology, the less certain I am of this.

In some areas technology does make things easier. It is amazing what I can do with the Alexa that sits here near my desk. But there are other areas where the choice of technology can lock you into ecosystems that may not fully align with your workstyle.

In this series of posts, I plan to explore the question of technological complexity from my own perspective as a writer. I’ll start by talking about tools specific to writing, but over time, I plan on running the gamut of tools I use on a regular basis. I want to explore not only the complexity of these tools, but look for ways to simplify. As a writer, I naturally want to spend my time writing. More and more I see tools getting in the way of writing. If that wasn’t the case, why do so many tools now add a “focus” or “distraction-free” mode? What choices can I make to simplify my writing ecosystem?

Writing is not the only area which tools add complexity. I see it in how I manage communications (email), and media (photos, books, videos, etc.). Even something as simple as contact management has grown inordinately complex.

I’ve been reading Jerome Holtzman’s classic book No Cheering in the Pressbox, and when I think about these sportswriters and the tools they used to get their jobs done, and compare them with my own, the complexity of my systems seem out of all proportion.

I’m attempting a top-down approach here starting with the choice of ecosystem, then the tools. And since I come to this through the perspective of a writer, that is the lens through which I will examine this question.